Anesthesia, sleep and consciousness

This project investigates how anesthesia and sleep modulate the content of subjective experiences during unresponsive periods, and how using anesthetics and sleep as tools may help us reveal the neural correlates of consciousness.

In a disconnected state, such as during anesthetic-induced deep sedation and sleep, behavioural responsiveness and awareness of the environment are absent, and internally generated subjective experiences can be either present (disconnected consciousness) or absent (unconsciousness).

By utilizing phenomenological interviews to assess conscious experiences, and EEG, fMRI and PET to assess brain activity, we contrast unresponsive states where consciousness is either connected, disconnected or absent.

This project is composed of a series of six large-scale experiments conducted at the Turku University Hospital and Turku PET Centre between 2014-2018 and conducted in collaboration with the Anesthesia Mechanisms Research Group led by Adjunct professor Harry Scheinin (University of Turku, Finland).

Thus far, the data has been utilized in the two finalized PhD theses, and several PhD projects are still under way.